1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for manufacturing a multi-element sintered material such as a superconducting ceramic material.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Heretofore, superconducting ceramic materials or the like have been manufactured by manually proportioning powdery ingredients with an electronic scale or the like, putting the proportioned ingredients into a sample pot, manually placing the sample pot on a pair of drive rollers of a drive device, rotating the sample pot by the drive device for a predetermined period of time to mix the ingredients, then molding the mixture into a sample of a certain shape, sintering the molded sample, preparing a test piece for testing the sintered sample and preserving the sample. Most of these manufacturing steps have been manually carried out.
However, the above manual process for preparing superconducting materials is disadvantageous for various reasons. If the number of samples to be prepared is increased, then a larger work force and a greater expenditure of time and money are required to produce the samples. The quality of the produced samples may vary depending on how skillful the work force involved in the preparation of the samples are, and errors may occur due to the increased number of samples.
The inventors achieved the present invention based on the belief that the aforesaid problems can be solved by automatically manufacturing multi-element sintered materials of various compositions, typically superconducting materials, each of uniform quality from powdery elements (raw material ingredients) with no or very little manual intervention.